Studies of Light Halo Nuclei from Atomic Isotope Shifts

Studies of Light Halo Nuclei from Atomic Isotope Shifts 

This paper reviews progress in the application of atomic isotope shift measurements, together with high precision atomic theory, to the determination of nuclear radii from the nuclear volume effect. The theory involves obtaining essentially exact solutions to the nonrelativistic three- and four-body problems for helium and lithium by variational methods. The calculation of relativistic and quantum electrodynamic corrections by perturbation theory is discussed, and in particular, methods for the accurate calculation of the Bethe logarithm part of the electron self energy are presented. The results are applied to the calculation of isotope shifts for the short- 

Department of Physics, University of Windsor Windsor, Ontario, Canada N9B 3P4 E-maii GDrake uwindsor.ca 

Department of Physics, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada E3B 5A3 E-maii zyan unb.ca 

On the experimental side, there is a large body of high precision data available for comparison. The particular significance in relation to the present work is that the theoretical uncertainty in the D-states for helium is now so small that their energies can be taken as absolute points of reference. The measured transition frequencies to the lower-lying S- and P-states can then be used to determine the absolute ionization energies of these states (see Drake and Martin [12], and Morton et al. [13]), and from this the QED energy shifts can be determined. 

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